Poverty Porn: We Who Are About to be Sanctioned Salute You!

For some time now, we have been used to what were once reasonably decent public service broadcasters - the BBC and Channel 4 - churning out a diet of Government propaganda. Whether Peston on the Nine O'Clock News blabbing on in his staccato way about economic orthodoxy or Channel 4's appalling Benefits Street, which elevated a few show offs to avatars fulfilling the neoliberal wet dream that unemployed people are all fat-guzzling couch potatoes, the mass media has long surrendered itself, like the printed press, to ever more extreme forms of capitalist apologetics.

Yet somehow the latest project from the BBC sticks in the craw even more than previous sagas of distasteful voyeurism. For now we have Britain's Hardest Grafter. This piece of poverty pornography sets poor people (only people earning less than £15,500 p.a. can enter) competing against each other. In return for doing physically unpleasant tasks - who knows, cleaning out the directors' septic tank perhaps or peeling his grapes on bended knee? - they will have the chance, via elimination for not working hard enough, of winning the equivalent of one year's living wage (outside London). In a truly generous step, the producers have promised that contestants will be compensated "not less than the national minimum wage" for the time they spend taking part.

The programme is being made by Twenty Twenty TV , a London production company which has produced classics such as The Hoarder Next Door, How Not To Get Old and Bad Santas. I did in truth see an episode of  the last on that list, which showed unemployed men being trained to be Father Christmas, with varying outcomes and a lot of exploitative insights on the way. While it had its humorous moments, it remained a voyeuristic treatment of human difficulties with no apparent attempt to ask why those experiencing them found themselves in such a situation.

Ultimately, what is the purpose of these programmes but to take a tiny, tiny sample of people and try to project their progress or lack of it in totally artificial conditions onto everyone else in their situation? Britain's Hardest Grafter will not, it seems, do anything to challenge the appalling undervaluing of very difficult types of work: if anything, it will reinforce it with a prize that wouldn't pay for a single advert were it being shown on a commercial channel. And by pitching it at poor people, including unemployed, it thrives on their despair - ten people a week competing for an ultimate prize that wouldn't even meet the annual living wage level for our capital city.

It's not just poverty porn. It's torture porn - inflicting yet more humiliation and suffering on people already struggling, offering no analysis of why so many are now mired in poverty other than implying they should be able to "graft" their way out of it, and, above all, setting people against each other. Divide and conquer, and what better way to do so than as "entertainment" on the gogglebox?

This may be the BBC's pathetic attempt to placate the Tory ogres, gathering at their gates to plunder their revenue and privatise the pitiful remains of public broadcasting, but it will be a short feast. Every threshold of exploitation crossed, every indignity heaped to the loudest acclaim will simply lead to demands for more, for fresh blood. Some have called this the Hunger Games, as today's parody becomes tomorrow's norm. And so true. This is the sort of media that brings forth programmes like Embarrassing Bodies and The Child Who Is Older Than Her Grandmother . These are the modern equivalents of the 19th and early 20th century circus "freak shows" that condemned thousands of vulnerable people to repeated lifelong abasement for the entertainment of the public, jabbering and judging about things of which they knew little or nothing, but encouraging and validating a cultural hierarchy where if your place was not much well at least you weren't one of  them.

And as we move from documentary (who would broadcast Cathy Come Home now?) to mocumentary (Saints and Scroungers) to sticking desperate people in an ever more wretched competition, what next? Poverty we know is associated with poor health. So if we are going to make a real show of making the masses work hard against each other, why not go for Last One Standing? Or maybe I'm Having A Heart Attack, Get Me Out of Here? Or how about Celebrity Benefits Assessment - perhaps David Starkey could sniff out the deserving poor over a nice glass of red?

This schadenfreude fest will only get worse under a Government keen to find public buy-in to its destruction of the welfare system and its stigmatising of the poor, fully backed up by a media eager to do its bidding. It marks the end of public broadcasting in any meaningful sense, twistedly helping to pave the way for the abolition of the licence fee system and the fragmentation of the BBC.

And in the future? We never thought we'd get here. So how long before we see the return of Gladiators? And no, I don't mean the ones with the gym equipment and cheesy grins.

If you have been disturbed by the contents of any of these programmes, you can help by signing the petition started by Green Party activist Sahaya James demanding the BBC scrap this programme before it begins. Please sign HERE.

Choosing Poverty

Mark Wood, who died in extreme hunger four months after his benefits were slashed.

No, not a blog piece in the spirit of the dreadful "austerity porn" of "Benefits' Street", but rather the title comes from the words of Green MEP Keith Taylor at the party conference in Liverpool yesterday afternoon, when (apparently channelling Madiba, and why not?) he declared, "Poverty is not inevitable. It is a deliberate political choice."

And so indeed it is: the choice of the Coalition Government. Whilst Cameron can declare that "Money is no object" for the 3,000 flooded households of Middle England, the rise in poverty, with one-in-five households now below the official poverty line, has been claimed to be unavoidable and, in such a context, quite acceptable by the Cabinet of Millionaires. Indeed, as an instrument of undermining labour unions and pressure from ordinary workers for pay rises, miring a sizeable chunk of the population in poverty can easily be seen as in fact a very deliberate policy choice by politicians bought up by the corporate interests that seek profit maximisation first and last in all that they do.

The Green conference's second full day, set in the striking if starkly contrasting opulence of the city's St George's Hall, had austerity as a theme in a number of segments of the day. As well as recommitting the party to a basic citizens' income, a seminar on austerity in Europe heard Nick Dearden from the World Development Movement deliver an impassioned plea for unity between progressives to oppose austerity. Speakers covered how the public sector is being squeezed to death while the bankers cream off public money to continue to pay themselves obscene levels of bonuses while a further session heard of Tory plans to break up national benefits altogether and return them to local authorities, not only to administer, but to set: going back to pre-1839 Poor Law arrangements.

This came on the very day that the Guardian reported on the utterly revolting case of Mark Wood, a 44 year old man with serious mental health problems who starved to death after the Government declared him fit for work and removed most of his benefits. Mark's final days on Earth appear to have been filled with abject hunger, fears about being evicted after his housing benefit was stopped and feeling too ashamed to ask relatives for financial help. Although the coroner was unable to establish a precise cause of death, he said that it was probably "caused or contributed to by Wood being markedly underweight and malnourished". He weighed 5st 8lbs (35kg) when he died; his doctor said his body mass index was not compatible with life.

Government politicians have been silent on Mark's case; but he is far from alone in terms of misery leading to a rash of suicides among unemployed and disabled people hounded by the ATOS firm appointed to review claimants' eligibility - so Ministers have often tried to shift the blame to ATOS, even to the point that they now seem to plan to take the contract off the French-owned IT firm in 2015 when it is due for renewal and had it to some other big conglomerate like Serco or Crapita. On BBC Any Questions, Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael was to be heard almost audibly wringing his hands (or maybe washing them) about the system not being up to dealing with "life events".

Well, whatever this man (the claimant of the second largest amount of expenses in the entire Commons - at £82,878 in 2012/13 over and above his salary) meant, the fact is that it is his system; it was designed and approved by the Cabinet he sits in and voted through the Commons by MPs he and others whipped to support it. ATOS is castigated again and again for its dreadful, sociopathic decisions and surreal testing of claimants, but is in fact simply doing the bidding of the Coalition - it is assessing against the ludicrous set of descriptors created under the aegis of the supposed genius Ian Duncan-Smith. And, as noted above, he and his ilk have every reason to want it to be as viciously ideologically destructive as indeed it is being.

Food bank not required: Carmichael - heading for the Westminster trough?

This, after all, is a country where food banks have massively risen in use - tens of thousands of people visit them each week to receive charity handouts of unhealthy processed food. 50% of them are people experiencing lengthy delays in benefit payments they are entitled to even under this system - a fact now acknowledged even by the right-wing Policy Exchange think-tank.

Is the Government concerned? Not at all - Tories, snickering like the overgrown (and overpaid) schoolboys many of them are during the food banks debate in the Commons, almost satirically claim they show the Big Society at work. And as for the Lib Dems? When they are not trying to downplay their use by claiming the feckless have brought benefits sanctions on themselves (Mr Carmichael again in a bewildering performance before MSPs), they are actually grinning and opening them: Treasury Secretary Danny Alexander, who claims £8,500 in public money a year for his kids travel costs alone, happily cut the ribbon at the opening of one in his own constituency.

"I'll have had your tea!" Grinning Minister at food bank.

Ashamed? Not at all. For people like Danny, it's all part of Living the Lie.

Keith Taylor, by contrast, has commissioned extensive research into food banks and the reasons people are driven to use them; and the story uncovered by his researcher Samir Jeraj is very different indeed. "Food Bank Britain" busted the myth put about by the Government that food banks are used purely because they exist. Rather it found that food bank use is soaring because people in Britain are experiencing the grind of poverty. Wages have stagnated for years, benefits are being cut and, increasingly, people are finding their benefits removed without any good reason.  In his own constituency of South-East England alone, Taylor tracked a 60% increase in use year on year, as well as the growing phenomenon of people forced to choose between "heating and eating".

The crisis is evident and so are the causes - the concentration of wealth in tiny numbers of hands to the extent that the recovery such as it is rests largely on the personal debt of the poor and random handouts such as PPI compensation payments. It is not sustainable - and sooner rather than later, it will come crashing down - and very soon, if Guardian commentator Ha-Joong Chang is right. But the big question is obviously how to tackle poverty in a way that is just and peaceful, rather than potential alternative scenarios of social conflict, chaos and authoritarian responses.

The Greens debated a range of solutions on offer: the party itself has long supported the concept of the Citizens' Income, which would give a basic income to all adults whether in work or not. This, the argument goes, would protect people from absolute poverty, permit people to be paid for socially useful work, such as caring for others, which currently goes unrecognised, and arguably, by maintaining a minimum level of demand in the economy, reduce the impact of future recessions.

But aside from issues such as how this might impact on the living wage (or not), the big question raised is how it would be paid for. And here, the elephant in the room is inequality; or, more specifically, tackling the excessive wealth of the richest in society. For at the same time as food banks have grown exponentially, the rich in Britain have never been richer: since the banking crisis of 2008/9, the total wealth of the UK has increased by over £60,000 millions - that's £1,000 for every man, woman and child in our country. But less than one sixtieth of that has reached the pockets of ordinary people.

Greens debated austerity across Europe - Clara Paillard from PCS union

So, rather than hover around housing reform and fruit & veg vouchers as a speaker from one liberal think-tank attempted, the real solution surely lies in looking at the top of the economic pile as well as the bottom: the richest 500 Britons could pay off the entire national debt and still have £30,000 millions to share between them, whilst CEO and top directors' pay has burgeoned, leaping by hundreds of per centage points through the recession.

The Greens have shown they are ready to argue for such tough approaches to the economic war being waged on ordinary people by the corporate elite, the one per cent (or in reality, even smaller number) who run our planet. The party has voted previously for a maximum wage (of £150,000 pa, after which income tax would be levied at 100%) and has called for inheritance tax to be increased rather than cut. In the European Parliament, Keith Taylor and his colleagues have argued successfully for an EU-wide transactions tax (variously known as the Robin Hood or Tobin tax) and for limits to financial sector bonuses - both have been opposed by the Conservatives and Lib Dems. And Green councillors in Brighton have adopted the Living wage for their employees.

This is not some ideological never-never land. Rather, it is the logical, urgently needed response to the crisis we face of a society bereft of any real, sustainable economics; of a country now the fourth most unequal on the face of the planet; and of an electorate deserted by the main parties (and the faux insurgents of UKIP) for the pockets of the corporates. In a world of finite resources, it is not a question of would it be economic ruin to redistribute wealth and create a new economic paradigm; rather, it is a question of what dark future lies ahead for all of us if we don't.

Food bank use is soaring because people in Britain are experiencing the grind of poverty. Wages have stagnated for years, benefits are being cut and, increasingly, people are finding their benefits removed without any good reason. - See more at: http://www.keithtaylormep.org.uk/2014/02/20/food-banks-government-damned-by-its-own-report/#sthash.6QrmJ2UJ.dpuf 

Food bank use is soaring because people in Britain are experiencing the grind of poverty. Wages have stagnated for years, benefits are being cut and, increasingly, people are finding their benefits removed without any good reason. - See more at: http://www.keithtaylormep.org.uk/2014/02/20/food-banks-government-damned-by-its-own-report/#sthash.6QrmJ2UJ.dpuf

Choking on the Crumbs: Breadline Britain

Britain's jobless fell by 5,000 this week. In our recession hit country, a mere two and a half million souls are officially out of work. The BBC trumpeted the Coalition spin that, as public sector jobs have fallen to their lowest number in over a decade, new jobs have been created in the private sector. "The Government's prediction that the private sector will compensate for the public cuts is coming true," said the gushing economics correspondent on the News channel.

Is it really? Not likely.

For not only are we not comparing like jobs, we are not comparing like terms either. Most of the public sector jobs cut have been full-time; most of the new private sector are part-time, temporary and often lower paid. Office of National Statistics figures show that at the end of 2012, full-time employment was 378,000 lower than in April to June 2008, the first quarter of the 2008/09 recession. Part-time employment was 572,000 higher comparing the same period.

Factor on top of this the findings published today that, on average, British workers are more than six per cent worse off in real terms than six years ago due to several years of pay freezes and lower than cost-of-living increases and it is little wonder that we remain in recession. This is unprecedented and in the same week that the Chief Executive of RBS, Stephen Hester, has resigned with a package of £5.6 million as a payoff for his failure in post - a situation he admits even his mother finds distasteful, but he's not listening to her never mind the rest of us.

A further squeeze has come from the Government, determined to cut a benefits bill which is constantly misrepresented as having increased because of some mysterious surge of disability and worklessness. In truth, while pensioners continue to cost over 50% of the £160 billions social security costs, less than 15% goes to disabled people and less than 5% is paid to unemployed people. Among non-pensioners, the biggest costs are things like housing benefit and child support for working families, their living costs squeezed between low wages and deregulated rents. In-work poverty has increased significantly since 2008. In a report published yesterday, Department of Work & Pensions' own statistics demonstrated that nearly one million more people fell into poverty in the Coalition's first full year in office - and of the 300,000 children living in families that fell into poverty in that time, all of them - every single one - was a working household.

There are two steps the Government could take tomorrow that would save the taxpayers billions and release money into the economy to get Britain working again.

The first would be to increase the national minimum wage to the living wage level - this is currently £7.45 per hour outside London and £8.55 inside the capital as opposed to the NMW's £6.19 (less if you are under 22 years of age). It is calculated on the basis of what most families need their breadwinners to earn to free them from poverty. It would significantly reduce the need for the State to pay benefits (effectively subsidising greedy employers) and improve the spending power and lives of millions of the poorest in our society. The deficit would be reduced - winners all round. Just as the introduction of the NMW did not lead to the increased unemployment that some right-wingers predicted before its introduction, the living wage would similarly challenge only the scale of currently massive profits and dividends, not employment levels.

Source: Guardian Newspaper

The second step would be to reintroduce controls on rents, which were abolished by the last Conservative regime, and outlaw buy-to-rent mortgages (which only became permissible in the late 1990s). The combination of cheap buy-to-let loans and no controls over the rents charged led to landlords expanding their property portfolios and pushing their rent levels up and up knowing that they would be covered by housing benefit from the state in millions of cases. With fewer people able to afford to buy houses, the numbers renting have increased by over one fifth in the last decade, many of them needing support with their costs as rents increased. Consequently the cost of housing benefit has risen substantially, reaching over £16 billions last year.

However, in response, the current Government, rather than capping rents, has capped the support net of housing benefit, which has simply caused disruption and misery for hundreds of thousands of low paid workers and their families, who have been left with a choice of somehow finding the cash to make up the gap between their housing benefit and rent, or moving to cheaper, inferior accommodation. Many of the poorest in London have been moved out of the city altogether to depressed areas like Newcastle where rents are lower, but jobs are even scarcer. It is a wicked policy that destroys lives and hope, even driving people out of work.

A final step would of course to be to make companies pay their fair share of corporation tax - although the HMRC says it has recouped over £20 billions of unpaid tax by challenging major corporations over the last three years, this makes for an average of £7 billions per annum - on some estimates, as highlighted by Green MP Caroline Lucas, barely one twentieth of the tax that is dodged each year.

But, of course, much of the austerity agenda is not about financial necessity at all - rather it is politically driven, a red herring to provide the excuse the Tories and their allies want to dismantle what is left of the welfare state and entrench the power and privilege of the rich elite which sponsors them and which has in effect bought up our democracy, our country and our planet.

Austerity Britain - still full of wealth, but in fewer and fewer hands. Growth will not solve the economic crisis - as our whole world moves towards increasing resource crises and challenges to economic sustainability, the traditional process of "trickledown" economics, with just enough crumbs falling from the tables of the rich to almost satisfy the less well off, will no longer work. Only a shift in the economic paradigm, a decisive move to a society of communal ownership of resources and a fair distribution of wealth will, in the long run, solve this deepest and most intractable of economic crises for many decades.

"We Ain't Burglars. We're Hungry" - the Genius of Charlie Chaplin

Plus ca change et plus la meme...

"Modern Times" was written and directed by Charlie Chaplin and released in 1936; but true to its title, it is as relevant now as then and stands as a testament to the genius of a man stereotyped in the popular imagination as the clown Tramp, ducking swinging ladders and falling into water troughs. Even more than later great offerings, this film shows just how deeply thoughtful and humane his work was, taking huge risks to bring to the commercial screen a story that partly through its comedic nature but also because of its very serious undertones, powerfully decried the injustice that so affected his view of the world.

It was Chaplin's final silent movie and co-starred his then-partner, Paulette Goddard. Inspired by a combination of a tour of Depression-era Europe and a long conversation on industrialisation with Mahatma Gandhi, it was also his first and decidedly most overtly political film, and part of the case against him when Senator Eugene McCarthy hounded him out of the USA nearly twenty years later. A deeply humane film, combining slapstick comedy with powerful political commentary, Modern Times tells the story of the iconic Tramp character struggling with life in an increasingly frenetic, competitive and commodified world. He is a cog in a giant machine - literally, in one memorable sequence in the steel mill he works in at the beginning.

Modern Times was filmed not only at the height of the Depression, which ruined so many lives and ultimately provoked global conflict; it was also crafted not long after the advent of Taylorism, which in the name of efficiency reduced the human input in manufacturing to the simplest and fewest individual steps possible. F W Taylor, lauded by modernists from Henry Ford to Vladimir Lenin, advocated a world where there was little creativity or individual realisation: a worker would perform repetitive tasks ad nauseam in order to obtain mass efficiencies of scale for their employer. Divorced from the ultimate product of their labour, deskilled from any craft or profession, and completely and rapidly replaceable, the Taylorite worker would be docile, obedient and cheap. Ford adapted this theory only in as far as paying high enough wages that he could create and sustain a market for what was produced - a useful and now largely forgotten concept, but one that nevertheless remained in essence as exploitative and debilitating as Taylor's more fundamentalist approach.

And so, after an initial sequence where a herd of sheep is juxtaposed with a crowd of people heading to work, we see Chaplin's character driven to distraction as he repeatedly tightens bolts on an assembly line while the factory owner does jigsaw puzzles in his luxurious office. The workers' toilet breaks are monitored by video (a strikingly futuristic concept for the time) and the employer is keen to try out the "Bellows Feeding Machine" on Chaplin. This automatic device promises to feed the workforce without them needing either a lunch break or even the need to breathe: eliminate the lunch hour and stay ahead of your competitors! the sales pitch proposes. The trial needless to say provides a platform for some amusing slapstick comedy which leaves Chaplin appearing like Hitler on acid, but the more serious point is made and The Tramp is sacked after having a nervous breakdown.

An accidental Communist

Out of work, he is accidentally mistaken for a Communist, a crime in the supposed Land of the Free, and incarcerated, only to be released when he equally accidentally stymies a jail break while under the influence of (again accidentally ingested) cocaine - an extremely daring move for the time, when the film code banned depiction of drug use from films.

This is perhaps the most poignant part of the film - for the Tramp prefers the security of prison to the vicissitudes of the outside world, with its unfairness and uncertainties. He repeatedly tries to get himself re-imprisoned, even offering to take the fall for Goddard's character, with whom he falls in love and tries to find so-called honest work to provide for.

Goddard is a young "gamine", in Hollywood parlance a sort of mischievous young woman living on the edge of society, a grown up street urchin. Like others in the film, she steals not from badness but in order to survive - she and her family are ecstatic when she manages to thieve six bananas from a boat. Likewise, when he is the nightwatchman of a store, Chaplin's character lets some former workmates steal food because they are starving.

In sharp contrast, others thrive in these modern times - and both the Gamine and the Tramp have to entertain and serve them in the climax of the film where they work in a restaurant, she as a dancer and he as a singing waiter. This leads to some telling moments as drunken, boorish bourgeoisie cavort around the hardworking staff. The centre-piece is a scene of sheer ingenuity, seemingly taken in a single, continuous shot, showing Chaplin taking a roast duck to a customer across a crowded dance floor in a tour de force imitated hundreds of times since but never yet equalled.

The US Library of Congress declared Modern Times as "culturally significant" in 1989, leading to it being given official protection for preservation for future generations and leading to special screenings at a recent Cannes Film Festival. But it is more than a record of its epoch - its portrayal of an exploitative world where people struggle hard to simply survive and where many are denied what others in the same country, same city, even the same street take for granted, has never been so pertinent.

While the factories Chaplin lampooned in the USA and Europe are now frequently silent and empty, the goods we consume all too often continue to be made by marginalised workers on dehumanised production lines, where breaks are minimalised luxuries if they even exist. Consider the computer giant Apple Corporation's allegedly prison-like conditions in their oriental factories where the pseudo-virtuous Steve Jobs creamed off so much of his personal fortune from people so desperate that their employer places nets outside windows to prevent frequently made suicide attempts.

Chaplin went on to make other films, such as The Great Dictator, which were political in their content, but perhaps not as controversial or challenging to the society he lived and worked in as Modern Times. His exile from America, dreadful though it was, was proof enough of how he was a giant and just how small minded McCarthy and the anti-communists were when they proclaimed liberty as they snuffed it out.

In a world where the skew of wealth between rich and poor is far, far worse than it was in 1936, where laws not even contemplated in the Depression era give the police in supposedly democratic states unparallelled powers of arrest over trade unionists and other social activists, and where US citizens are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, Modern Times may be over 80 years old, but remains as fresh and relevant as ever.

Ultimately, Chaplin was an optimist - when Goddard's character asks him, "What's the use of trying?", the Tramp grins as the strains of Smile, composed by Chaplin, begin to play. He replies confidently, "Buck up - never say die! We'll get along."

It is the optimism of a better, fairer tomorrow, a tomorrow of humanity and equality. It is a cry from a passionate heart and one that, though made in silence, deserves to be heard as loudly as ever.

Limits to Growth = Limits to Wealth

(Right -The Desert of Capitalism: on the left in this satellite picture is Haiti, whose Government has permitted full-scale exploitation of the forests by big business. On the right, the Government of the Dominican republic has poured public funds into Eco-tourism and conservation - the results are plain to see.)

The mainstream of politics often combines its reluctant nod to the need for environmental protection with a hasty assurance that capitalism can yet deliver "green growth". Like latter day alchemists, they claim a synthesis of the free market with modern technology, and a healthy dose of genetic engineering for good measure, will somehow deliver a nirvana of never-ending increases in production and consumption and, of course, profit in a sustainable way.

This, of course, is the underlying folly of capitalism - that limitless demand can somehow be met ultimately with limitless supply. In any other realm of human activity, under any other title, the concept would be laughed out as fantasy at best, dangerous delusions at worst. But for our planet, its species mired in an unchallenged liberal economy now for over twenty years, if not much longer, capitalism is as essential as the air we breathe (or even more essential, given the damage capitalism is permitted to inflict on our air). Since Fukyama declared the end of history with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have been left with a received wisdom and socio-political consensus that there is only one way forward: free markets, deregulated as far as possible. And through the 1990s and the start of this decade, enough crumbs fell to enough people from the Masters' tables to maintain the illusion that somehow everyone would benefit. The suffering of hundreds of millions of the poorest in all societies, their poverty - both relative and absolute - was effectively shut out of the media as effectively as the thousands of "gated communities" that have sprung up throughout the western world have physically shut out the offending sight of poor from the eyes of the rich.

Of course, we now see this Neverland unravelling before our eyes with the banking crisis and the recession. But how has it been dealt with? After all the wringing of hands, the denunciation of "greedy" bankers (as if somehow there were some who were not) and the declaration that such things could never be allowed to happen again, what do we find? A handful of bankers have departed their well-paid jobs, in nearly all cases with handsome pay offs and swollen pension pots. Even Fred Goodwin, who captained the Royal Bank to ruin, continues to pick up a pension of £342,500 plus pa, along with a seven figure lump sum, while 9,000 of his former employees have lost their jobs. At least he will be able to get the scratches on his car fixed. His worst penalty? "Blackballed" allegedly by the membership committee of Saint Andrews Golf Club - now that's capital regulating itself!

Now this past week, we are told the bankers are now returning to their old habits. Kept afloat with the hard earned money of taxpayers, after spending years themselves doing their utmost to avoid paying their personal income tax and their organisations' corporate taxes, they now feel ready to carry on as normal.

No surprise. The capitalist system has an inherent driver - it is to maximise your return for the minimum investment of effort: You want something I have. My intention becomes to find what is the absolute greatest level of value that you will surrender to me for it. There are no ethical considerations. No long term planning. No morality other than how do I extract the most wealth from you, for me. Now.

So it is little wonder that, with some signs the current downturn has flattened out, that capitalists seek to assert their normal behaviours. They have always done so in the past - why would they not now? It is, we are told, the "natural" way of doing things, so why would their nature suddenly change?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/banks-are-forgetting-lessons-of-crisis-already-warns-turner-1716001.html

The corollary of all this though is that the concept of a "return to normal" IS unrealistic - the imbalance in wealth, globally and in the UK, is at a historic high. The gap between rich and poor has never been wider. Tiny numbers of people hold vast quantities of wealth while resources grow tight and environmental degradation impoverishes hundreds of millions - both developments driven by the voracious need of capitalism to feed the pockets of shareholders rather than the bellies of hungry children.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/aug/04/workandcareers.executivesalaries

It is not sustainable, which is why a return to normal ways can only be a temporary phenomenon. Capitalism is driving the planet and our species to the edge. Any recovery may last a while - a year, two years, a decade even, but soon enough, the impact of passing not just peak oil but peak carbon fuel production will kick in with a thump that will bring whole economies crashing down, banks and governments with them, and social unrest, disorder, violence and war may well be the most obvious result.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/08/kingsnorthclimatecamp.climatechange
There is another future: a Green one, offering redistribution of wealth, fairer societies, banks and enterprises focussed on mutual protection and community need rather than shareholder dividends and private profit. A sustainable future that has plans for the next 50 and 100 years, not the next 3 to 5 years which fit the common corporate business plans of most capitalist companies. This way recognises that there are limits to growth, there is only so much that can be extracted without needing to replenish. And this in turn leads to the point that if there are limits to growth, there need also to be limits to wealth: that a sustainable society seeking the common good has, by virtue our human condition and our planet's limits, to set a maximum level of wealth that an individual can hold, in income and in wealth. Any other way can only lead to the chaos and collapse of the capitalist scenario.

We face a choice: green and growth cannot be intertwined indefinitely; we need to learn that there are limits - to what we can have, to what we can take. Instead, we have to find how we can do more with what we have - and all the evidence points to those people who already do so have happier and healthier lives than those who are tied in, emotionally, psychologically, financial and physically, to the capitalist treadmill. If this can be translated to the whole community, if it can become the zeitgeist, the underpinning ethic of society, a transformation can begin - but it will involve hard choices and political action.

It won't be an easy option or a soft choice: I am not arguing for a touchy-feely hippy revolution.

But I AM arguing for a revolution.